Follow me

I hate Facebook

I hate it for what it does to the spontaneous online publishing. For making it almost impossible to reach any audience without conforming to their implicit rules.

You are stuck in a weird filter bubble, your friends and subscribers are equally stuck. Not all of you know anything about it, but some already suspect something is wrong.

Linear, non-algorythmic feeds gave equal opportunity to everyone to get some attention. Chronology was fair. Many looked for the best time to post, but this was the only way to cheat. With introduction of algorythmic feeds this fairness and simplicity of rules was lost. Your attention is now guided by a pseudo-intelligent software taught on big data that seemed somehow relevant to its creators. Your experience, you feelings, you very own needs are not and theoretically can’t taken into consideration. You are a datapoint, and if it fails for you, you are just an exception. An invisible variation on a DAU chart.

I hate that you have to become a marketer, a cheater, a crook just to get heard. Even if only by your own family. You are still given direct messages, but sometimes you don’t want any directness. You want to publish and to be heard. You want to read in a predictable manner and not to miss important stuff about the lives of the people you care about. You just want to enjoy your life with convenient instruments, not to fight against them. Yet you have to.

Telegram’s channels are a temporary respond to this, an attempt to bring back fairness. The default level of notifications for Telegram are highest possible: push notification on mobile. So even a couple of active channels can get you annoyed. Telegram is interesting as an example of recycled technology: it added very few things to what we had ages ago in IRC, yet it migrated to handheld electronics and played nicely on our desire for private to remain private, even if we have nothing to hide. Otherwise it’s old news, and I don’t think it will ever get as big as WeChat and it will fail miserably at channels in a while. The noisiness and how badly it fits for reading of long texts are just the superficial reasons for failure.

This would be a perfect moment to announce my Telegram channel, but I won’t.